THE oceanographer who discovered the wreck of the Titanic believes he has pinpointed a submerged shoreline 400 feet below the Black Sea which proves Noah's flood really happened.

Underwater archaeologist Robert Ballard says his team of researchers have uncovered enough evidence to conclude The Great Flood of Noah described in the Bible was a real natural catastrophe.

He told ABC News he had been investigating the possibility that a massive flood occurred in the Black Sea region as the last Ice Age came to a near extinction-level conclusion when melt waters suddenly cascaded into the world's oceans.

His team found an ancient shoreline off the coast of Turkey which was the former coastline of an ancient nation.

Mr Ballard believes this is proof of Noah's Flood – which was one of many taking place across the world as glacial meltwaters forced unimaginable amounts of water through Turkey’s Straits of Bosporus towards the Black Sea.

By using carbon dating methods to date shells found along the shoreline 400 feet below the surface Mr Ballard has concluded the violent global flood took place around 5000 BC.

He said: “'We went in there to look for the flood, not just a slow moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then stayed... the land that went under stayed under.

“It probably was a bad day. At some magic moment, it broke through and flooded this place violently, and a lot of real estate, 150,000 square kilometres of land, went under.”

His research follows a 1997 study by William Ryan and Walter Pitman who, drawing on archaeological and anthropological evidence, claimed that 'ten cubic miles of water poured through each day', and that the deluge continued for at least 300 days.

More than 60,000 square miles of land were flooded, they said, and the lake's level rose by hundreds of feet after merging with the Mediterranean, triggering mass animal migrations across Europe.

According to their study, the force of the water was two hundred times that of Niagara Falls, sweeping away everything in its path. It also transformed the Black Sea from an isolated freshwater lake surrounded by farmland into a saltwater inlet.

The researchers, whose findings have been backed up by carbon dating and sonar imaging, claimed that the story of Noah's flood had its origin in this cataclysmic event.